We came across an article on Search Engine Land stating that one of the fastest ways to de-index a page is to delete the page and submit a “temporary sitemap” file. This seemed like an overkill and we thought it might be interesting to see how different methods stack up against one another.
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There was an article on Search Engine Land that said one of the fastest ways, if not the fastest way, to get a page out of the serps is to 404 page and submit a temporary sitemap showing that the page is gone. This happens with clients from time to time, where they have an old version of the page, they 301 it or they just want to take it down and it frustrates them that it is still showing up in the serps.
We wanted to try different methods. The first one was just doing a regular 404, the next one was a 410 – it tells a page is gone completely, we no index the page, then we delete the page 404 and submitted a single sitemap with the date that the changes were gone as was instructed in the Search Engine Land article.
One that we didn’t do and I know this works and is very effective is you can actually go into Search Console and you can request that a url be removed. That is probably the best way to do it but perhaps that is not available and really, this is just an academic test to see how things go.
At the end of the day, none of them were terribly fast and effective and most disappointingly, the delete and submission of the site map didn’t get the effect of getting the page out of the serps. What was quite interesting is that it started showing up in Search Console that the page didn’t exist but it would still show up in the serps.
So, it is an odd disconnect that Search Console can say that the page is gone but it is not connecting to the results that are actually showing.
If you need to do this, I would go into Search Console and remove the url there and you can do that very quickly within Search Console. Bear in mind that if you put the whole domain in, it would take the whole domain out of the serps and I have seen it done before, where the client was – the site is gone and I don’t know what happened – when what they were meant to do was just to remove one page in the serps and they ended up putting their whole domain and removing the whole site from the serps.
Be careful with that but otherwise, that is the fastest way to get a page removed. But in any of these methods, you are really in the whatever time it takes for the search engine to process the page that it is gone now.